Hopkins and the nearby College of Notre Dame signed off on a new deal last week, the Sister Alma McNicholas Women Scientists Program, formalizing a two-year renewable program that will offer three promising Notre Dame science-major undergraduates the chance to work during either the summer or academic school year as trainees with choice JHMI laboratories and researchers.
The program, named for a late Notre Dame biology professor whose estate provides the program's funding, will offer its participants a year-long assignment to a Johns Hopkins School of Medicine laboratory and faculty mentor. Selection of laboratories is currently underway, as are Notre Dame student applications; the year-long program schedule will begin its premier assignments this upcoming spring semester.
The McNicholas Program codifies a collaboration between Notre Dame and Hopkins that began in 2005. Peter Hoffman, chair of the biology department at Notre Dame, and several JHMI researchers and administrators joined forces to pair interested and promising Notre Dame students with labs looking for student work.
Due to the lack of funding, growth of the venture has been delayed until now. Before the institution of the McNicholas program, the admissions and placement process was relatively informal. News of the program and its two to three annual participating students was mass-emailed to the Hopkins faculty list. Given the additional McNicholas program's stipend of a $200 supply fund for each student, Catherine Will, who oversees lab recruitment and placement for both the summer and academic year programs, is enthusiastic about the program. "The placement process is so much easier, the news of the stipends got a very enthusiastic response out of the faculty. Professors are more than eager to have such talent in their labs without having to worry about the serious problem of where to find funding to cover the additional expenses. Most labs in the program are funded with NIH [National Institutes of Health] grants, and the restrictions that come with that money rarely allow funds to pay for a student trainee," Will said.
In addition to the supply stipend, parking passes will be provided for participating students, easing the burdens on them as the program funding does for that of their labs.
The McNicholas program caters specifically to Notre Dame undergraduates interested in pursuing careers in the laboratory sciences such as biology, chemistry and biopsychology, which are three program-applicable fields of study offered as majors at Notre Dame. Students who apply must be full time Notre Dame students with a GPA of 3.4 or higher, be majoring in the sciences and have an interest in laboratory research as a potential career path.
The program is a crucial experience for those students who view "medical school and graduate school as their next career step," Hoffman said. The program demands a minimum of 10 hours per week of research work and will provide undergraduates with opportunities "above and beyond those currently offered, the best of both worlds when the results of excellent teaching at Notre Dame is brought to opportunities for hands-on work in some of the world's best laboratories."
For Notre Dame, the McNicholas program is a definite foot in the door for enterprising undergraduates to get hands-on experience with research as well as gain exposure to post-docs and faculty who have made a career out of laboratory work; for participating labs, Hoffman notes that "this venture will provide Hopkins with some of the best talent we have."
In addition to the on-campus and independent research opportunities already sponsored by faculty at Notre Dame, the McNicholas program will provide a wider array of research options for undergraduates. The increased response from Hopkins labs eager to hire funded students makes prospective placement all the more tailored to a participant's interests. The breadth and depth of Hopkins's resources would lead any Homewood resident interested in lab research to hope for the expansion of the program's initiative to incorporate Hopkins undergraduates and their peers at other Baltimore Exchange institutions.
